[MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge Swords)

[Phillip Lenhardt]

On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 11:15:54PM +0100, Marian Griffith wrote:
> In <URL:/archives/meow?group+local.muddev> on Wed 09 May, Sie Ming wrote:
 
>> A question to which I don't have an answer is: How much travel is
>> needed to make something a distinct location?
 
> That is fairly simple to answer :)
 
> Slightly more than the average player is willing to wait in a single
> game session.  And that means that the travel must not only cover a
> significant distance but also must keep the player from speedwalking
> there.

Making a player waste time, just to enforce an artificial sense of
scale, is Bad. Travel is boring (excepting for Buehler's game, where
the process of travelling from point A to point is by design as much
fun as whatever is at point B). People don't enjoy sitting 20 minutes
on a boat in EQ.

If your goal is for players to have home areas and neighbors with whom
they frequently interact, then implement mechanics for that
_specifically_.

For example, someone mentioned teleporting "naked" as an option. If
you can teleport anywhere, but not with your stuff, the place you
store your stuff is "home", and if there are restrictions on where you
can store your stuff, you'll have neighbors.

Another example would be by using faction. Home would be the place
where the guards defended you and where you got the best deals in the
npc shops.

Another example, teleport exhaustion. You can teleport anywhere, but
you can't do anything significant for several minutes once you arrive
(except maybe teleport somewhere else?).

On the other hand, if you are using travel time to make the world seem
big, I can think of better (or least equally good ways of doing
so). For one, just create a lot of content. If there are thousands of
interesting locations and at least as many quests the mere fact that
some website somewhere has catalogued them doesn't make make the world
smaller, just more comprehensible, maybe. For another, as a player
attempts to act on larger scales (eq crossinga continent versus
crossing a city) give them more choices (preferably very hard to macro
and hopefully significant ones) to make in order to get there.

In general, I object to making players spend time on _anything_ they
don't want to, with the necessary exception of interaction with other
players.
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